The Plastic Cup Bar at the End of the Concourse

Call me Seamus. I’m a traveler at the end of the world, which at this moment is an almost-deserted airport tapas bar in Denver. I feel like I need to explain a few things. First of which is this: I’m back. At least for a minute.

It’s important because in essence, I’m dead, at least as a character. I killed myself off at the completion of what I still regard as the seminal first phase of this document. My Moriarty was alcohol, and my Reichenbach Falls was a fully-intentioned attempt to quit. But Seamus, and the largely (if not entirely) manageable relationship with the bottle that makes him possible, survived. I didn’t feel great about that, for a while. I still don’t, at least not always. But I’m more or less okay with it right now. The world has got much, much bigger problems than me day-drinking at a Tapas bar at the ass-end of an empty concourse. By way of example, there’s the little detail of the concourse being empty. Now why should that be?

You see, time is a fascinating thing. Time and our relationship to it, which isn’t separable from our relationship to death. It’s time that marches us there, after all, one hand pinned behind our backs. There’s nothing you can do about that; it’s our only absolute certainty. And time, in this instance, dictates that when you read this, you will have much more information than me about the coronavirus with the not-very-catchy name of COVID-19 that at this moment, from my vantage point in time, appears to be brewing up to the be the world’s next great pandemic. Now that could be wrong – this post could be bizarrely naïve a couple months from now. Or it could be right. I could be dead. You can’t be, though, or you wouldn’t be reading this. See? You’re perfectly safe. Good news. Me though? I’m in an airport right at the moment of dizzying escalation, where a disease of uncertain danger and unknown transmissibility is currently zipping around the world through precisely this sort of node. For a thousand miles in every direction, the place most likely to house at least one human disease vector is right here. Right where old Seamus is conducting his business. 

And people wonder why I drink. Jesus.

Speaking of Jesus, today is Ash Wednesday. I had thought seriously of giving up alcohol as a Lenten sacrifice, but this doesn’t seem the time. I’ll be doing a daily devotional instead. But today marks the beginning of a penitential period leading up to Easter, one of the most important periods of the Catholic and Anglican religious calendar. It’s customary to apply ashes to the forehead, as a reminder of our own mortality. I would be doing that this evening, too, make no mistake, were I not travelling. Bur it’s okay – I need no particular reminders of my mortality just now, and the spirit of the whole thing is with me. All of which is a somewhat roundabout way of letting you know that while I was away, I returned with a vengeance to the Anglo-Catholic, Episcopal church of my youth. Don’t worry – I won’t be giving you too much about that here. There’s scripture about parading your piety in public, and anyway it’s not your problem. The things I need to figure out with God are between me and God. But I’m mentioning it now so that if it does come up again, I don’t have to do an elaborate explanation. I’ve neither time nor patience for that and neither, I’m sure, do you. 

So anyway, the airport, usually thronged, is nearly empty. And I feel good about this. I feel like a loyalist. This is my airport, my second home, the departure point for so many meaningful things in my life. This is also, fundamentally, what I do. I travel, I move over the earth, I know things and sell things and make other guys rich by doing it and I stay up late and skip sleep and miss meals and get it all done anyway. Funny enough, I’m already sick today. I don’t know what it is. It’s a little different already from your run of the mill bug; kind of a weird, discombobulating fatigue. But I’m going anyway. It’s a stupidly dangerous place to be, off to Texas (where there are reported cases of the virus) in pursuit of a low-likelihood deal. But again, I’m going anyway. If this is the thing that kills me, it’ll be very on-brand.

There are people here, don’t get me wrong. But there’s an unaccustomed solemnity about them. No one is jostling for bar seats. Single businessmen with expensive watches sit alone, lost in thought. Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” blares over speakers that you can’t usually hear at all. There’s something decidedly weird in the air, like if they’d thrown the party for the Masque of the Red Death and nobody showed. Or not nobody, but only the lame noblemen (the cool ones found a better party), the sparse attendees sitting around the margins of the dance floor in a mostly empty room, sipping from plastic cups, waiting for something to happen. Which it will, as we all know, but not in the way they’re hoping. It’s like that when you’re not cool. That’s how things go. 

A week or two ago I found myself at an incredibly strange bar in…where? Some airport, some city somewhere. A tiny, plastic-cup bar at the end of the concourse where everyone was inexplicably queer. Something about that phrase seemed incredibly apt, a title for something needing to be written, but perhaps too late to be read. The Plastic Cup Bar at the End of the Concourse. I’m always there. I may always be. Perhaps for eternity. 

I’ll return to this point: you’ll know far more than me about what “always” means, if it ever meant anything at all. So we write, and we drink. A few of us, for the rest of you, even pray. Feel free to pray for us, if you’ve got it in you. Can’t hardly blame you if you don’t.